Designing with Friction: Summer 2026 Research Series
A public writing series translating my Ed.D. research on generative AI, pedagogical friction, and durable learning into practical frameworks for K-12 leaders.
Visible performance is not always durable learning.
Generative AI can make academic work look complete while leaving student understanding uncertain. This public series explores how educators and leaders can distinguish helpful ease from the kinds of friction that develop knowledge, judgment, authorship, and agency.
My current study examines how K-12 educators and school-system leaders understand and navigate these questions. The framework I am developing asks when schools should preserve friction, reduce it, or redesign it.
The 10-week sequence.
The Illusion of Completion: Why Flawless Student Work Can Signal Zero Learning
Why polished AI-supported performance can make student understanding difficult to see.
Productive vs. Exclusionary Friction: Protecting Learning Without Creating Unnecessary Barriers
Protecting meaningful learning effort without creating avoidable barriers.
Beyond Academic Integrity: AI Is a Learning-Design Problem
Moving from rule enforcement toward learning design.
When Guidance Lags Behind Use: Educator Sensemaking in the Age of AI
How educators navigate effort, access, authorship, and uncertainty when formal guidance is incomplete.
The Load-Bearing Layer: Why AI-Era Learning Design Is an Institutional Problem
How policy, infrastructure, leadership, and professional learning shape what classrooms can sustain.
Governance and Design
Decision rights, procurement practices, and educational guardrails.
Assessment Redesign in Practice
Making student thinking, judgment, revision, and authorship visible.
Media Ecology and Durable Learning
How generative systems reshape knowledge production and trust.
Speaking and Consulting Applications
Turning the framework into workshops, conversations, and design tools.
Summer Wrap and Forward Look
What the public argument clarifies and which questions remain open.
A practitioner-friendly framework.
Pedagogical friction
Meaningful resistance learners encounter while building understanding, judgment, skill, and agency.
Productive friction
Challenge that contributes to learning and can be supported without being removed.
Exclusionary friction
A barrier that blocks access or participation without educational benefit.
Noetic friction
The effort of forming, connecting, questioning, and revising ideas.
Rhetorical friction
The work of making claims, selecting evidence, and taking responsibility for expression.
Existential friction
The encounter with uncertainty, ownership, identity, and purpose.
Infrastructural friction
The policies, systems, tools, and conditions that shape what schools can sustain.
Four ways to bring the argument into a room.
Designing with Friction: Protecting Durable Learning in the Age of Generative AI
Keynote or leadership session for educators, leaders, and conference audiences.
Designing with Friction: Classroom Assessment and Assignment Redesign
Practical workshop for teachers, coaches, and curriculum leaders.
Beyond AI Compliance: Policy, Procurement, and Decision Rights for School Leaders
Leadership workshop or board conversation for district decision-makers.
Civic Reasoning and Historical Inquiry in Synthetic Media Environments
Curriculum workshop or conference session for civic-learning audiences.
Public research, no participant data.
This public series shares conceptual frameworks, literature connections, and practitioner-facing reflections connected to my Ed.D. dissertation proposal. It does not report study findings, participant data, interview material, survey responses, school names, or confidential research records. Formal study data, if collected after approval, will remain in secure IRB-approved storage.